1. Technical Field
The invention relates to multi-core optical fibers and to optical communication systems using multi-core optical fibers.
2. Related Art
This section introduces aspects that may be helpful to facilitating a better understanding of the inventions. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is in the prior art or what is not in the prior art.
Many optical communication systems include a series of one or more spans of optical fiber that transport data-modulated optical carriers between an optical transmitter and an optical receiver. The optical fiber may be a single-mode optical fiber or a multi-mode optical fiber. While a single-mode optical fiber supports only a single propagating optical spatial mode per wavelength channel, a multi-mode optical fiber supports a plurality of orthogonal propagating optical spatial modes per wavelength channel. For that reason, a multi-mode optical fiber can transmit multiple optical data streams per wavelength channel, in parallel, i.e., over the plurality of propagating optical spatial and polarization modes. Recently, efforts have been made to develop optical communication systems based on multi-mode optical transmission fibers because of the hope that their multiple propagating optical modes would enable an increase in total data transmission rate.